Posts

Flutter Tutorial Part 2 - Understanding The Basics

Last time we went through development environment setup for Flutter and generated a demo app. Today, let’s take a deeper look at the generated source code and understand how it works. Without further ado, I’m going to open the project in VSCode. If you are using VSCode also, make sure you install the Official Flutter Extension. Folders And Files. Wow, that’s a lot of directories - you might say, but actually we can ignore most of them.

November 15, 2022 Read

Flutter Tutorial Part 1 - Development Environment Setup

This tutorial will guide you through setting up your local Flutter development environment on MacOS, enabling development for iOS and Android. It ends with running your very first Flutter App. Why Flutter? I have dabbled with Dart for some toy backend experiment when it first came out years ago, even before ES6 era. I really liked how it was typed and offer very mature IDE integrations. I also loved its Stream API.

October 30, 2022 Read

Messy UI? Think In Components, Not HTML & CSS

I have seen too many companies fall into the trap of thinking they don’t need a design system. This often leads to inconsistent ugly looking products. It also drags down velocity by repeated bug fixes on small UI details, draining time not only for developers, but also QA, Design, and Product Teams. It is never too early to adopt a design system. The Problem Have you ever encountered conversations like this between designers and developers?

October 4, 2021 Read

Typed-GraphQL Performance Optimization

While working on a project for a client, we came across an interesting twist to a common problem. We were tasked with making the API backend that powers a mobile app called Playhouse, a mobile app that displays real estate listings to its users in a nice little video package. We decided to make a GraphQL API and got to building. During the design process, we made a point of keeping it maintainable for the long run.

October 1, 2021 Read

Part 2 - Persisting Data To Database

This is article is part of a series. They are: Part 1 - Simple GraphQL Server with Juniper And Actix Part 2 - Persisting Data To Database In the previous blog post, we showed how easy it is to create a GraphQL server in Rust. In this post, we will hook it up to a Postgres database. To do this we will use the tokio-postgres package. While it is possible to use an ORM in Rust (the most popular choice being diesel), that topic is very dense on its own, and even in high level frameworks like Node.

March 30, 2021 Read

Part 1 - Simple GraphQL Server with Juniper And Actix

This is article is part of a series. They are: Part 1 - Simple GraphQL Server with Juniper And Actix Part 2 - Persisting Data To Database Rust is an upcoming programming language that is often regarded as a low-level systems language, however it comes with language features that allow it to extend itself into other domains while minimizing the boilerplate you might expect from a systems language. We will be looking at Rust as a GraphQL Server and demonstrating its simplicity when paired with powerful frameworks such as Juniper and Actix Web.

March 23, 2021 Read

Streaming GeoJSON with GDAL, Rack::Chunked, and Rails Live Streaming

TL;DR For you busy folks who just want it to work, here is the gist. Background A few weeks ago, I was at NationBuilder building a GeoJSON API for organizers. The end goal for this project is to provide accurate political districting information through this API and exposes a map management interface for district updates. Application Architecture This application is built on top of the popular Ruby On Rails framework, and uses PostGIS as geographic data storage backend.

August 22, 2014 Read